David Whyte on The Self

28 Jul David Whyte on The Self

The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of that part of us not defined by our worries and anxieties. But this pursuit begins only by admitting that human anxiety is endless and to be expected. These waves of existential anxiety may knock down the surface self, but there is another, deeper self with a larger perspective that was never knocked down at all. The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of this non-self, one large enough to hold the necessary losses of a human life.

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“No human being has ever lived without knowing heartbreak,” David Whyte tells us. “And to accept that truth is to give a merciful gift to ourselves.” As David reveals, so often our hearts break because the love we offer—whether to a partner, a friend, a child, or a place—is not returned to us in the same way. Yet if we retreat from experience of unrequited love, he says, we miss the opportunity to discover the countless invisible ways that the world offers us its love in return, often unlooked for and unrecognized.